LET Secondary English Major: 150-Item Specialisation Review Plan

LET Secondary English Major: 150-Item Specialisation Review Plan

English is the largest LET Secondary specialisation by taker volume — about 25-30% of all LET candidates take English Major. The 150-item Major Field exam covers language structure, literature (Philippine, world, regional), language teaching pedagogy, and communication skills.

This post is the topic-by-topic plan that the LET Major Field overview hands off to for English Major candidates.

What PRC actually asks

Approximate item distribution across the 150 English Major items:

Literature blocks (Philippine + World + Regional) total 55 items — over a third of the exam. This is where preparation depth matters most.

Language structure

The grammar and syntax block tests usage at advanced-academic level, beyond what Gen Ed English covers. Drill list:

• Subject-verb agreement including with collective nouns, indefinite pronouns, and inverted sentences
• Pronoun reference and pronoun-antecedent agreement, including ambiguous reference
• Tense and aspect: simple, perfect, progressive, perfect progressive — all combinations
• Modal verbs: ability, permission, possibility, obligation, advice
• Conditional sentences: zero, first, second, third, mixed conditionals
• Passive voice formation across all tenses
• Reported (indirect) speech with tense changes
• Gerunds vs. infinitives — verb patterns
• Articles: definite, indefinite, zero article rules
• Subjunctive mood usage
• Parallel structure in lists and comparisons
• Misplaced and dangling modifiers
• Nominal, adjective, adverbial clauses

Items often present a long, complex sentence and ask for the grammatical error or the appropriate revision. Drill 100+ items across grammar and syntax during your review.

Philippine literature

The most-tested literature block. Drill major writers and their famous works:

Pre-colonial and Spanish era:

• Oral tradition: epics (Hudhud, Darangen, Biag ni Lam-ang, Ibalon, Hinilawod), folktales, riddles
• Spanish-era writers: Pedro Bukaneg (Biag ni Lam-ang transcription), Francisco Balagtas (Florante at Laura)

Propaganda and Revolution era:

• José Rizal: Noli Me Tangere, El Filibusterismo, "Mi Ultimo Adios," "A La Juventud Filipina"
• Andres Bonifacio: "Pag-ibig sa Tinubuang Lupa," "Katapusang Hibik ng Pilipinas"
• Marcelo H. del Pilar, Graciano Lopez Jaena, Antonio Luna

American colonial era:

• Jose Garcia Villa (poetry)
• Carlos Bulosan: America Is in the Heart, "I Want the Wide American Earth"
• Manuel Arguilla: "How My Brother Leon Brought Home a Wife"
• Paz Marquez Benitez: "Dead Stars" (often called the first modern Filipino short story in English)
• Bienvenido Santos: "Scent of Apples"

Post-war / contemporary:

• Nick Joaquin: "May Day Eve," The Woman Who Had Two Navels, A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino
• N.V.M. Gonzalez: "The Bread of Salt"
• Edith Tiempo: "Bonsai" (poetry)
• F. Sionil Jose: Po-On, Mass, Tree, My Brother, My Executioner, The Pretenders (Rosales saga)
• Gregorio Brillantes
• Lualhati Bautista: Dekada '70, Bata, Bata, Pa'no Ka Ginawa?
• Bienvenido Lumbera, Jose Lacaba, Jose Lansang
• Contemporary writers: Lakambini Sitoy, Merlinda Bobis, Eric Gamalinda

Filipino-language literature:

• Lazaro Francisco: Maganda Pa ang Daigdig
• Macario Pineda: "Suyuan sa Tubigan"
• Rogelio Sicat: "Impeng Negro"
• Genoveva Edroza-Matute: "Kuwento ni Mabuti"
• Edgardo Reyes: Sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag

For each writer, know: nationality, period, major works, themes. Items often ask "who wrote X?" or "which work depicts the Marcos era?"

World literature

Drill major writers and their famous works across Western and Asian traditions:

Ancient/classical:

• Greek: Homer (Iliad, Odyssey), Sophocles (Oedipus Rex, Antigone), Plato (Republic), Aristotle (Poetics)
• Roman: Virgil (Aeneid), Ovid (Metamorphoses)

Medieval:

• Dante (Divine Comedy), Chaucer (Canterbury Tales)

Renaissance through 18th century:

• Shakespeare (major tragedies, comedies, sonnets — Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream)
• Cervantes (Don Quixote)
• Milton (Paradise Lost)
• Swift (Gulliver's Travels)

Romantic and Victorian:

• Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron
• Dickens, Bronte sisters, George Eliot
• American: Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain

Modernist:

• Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Pound
• Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner

Postwar and contemporary:

• Garcia Marquez, Kafka, Beckett, Camus, Pamuk
• Rushdie, Achebe, Soyinka, Coetzee
• Asian: Rabindranath Tagore, Murakami, Mo Yan, Han Kang

For each: nationality, period/movement, major works.

Regional and indigenous literature

A smaller block but consistently tested. Drill list:

• Cebuano: Vicente Sotto, Marcel Navarra, Resil Mojares
• Hiligaynon: Magdalena Jalandoni, Ramon Muzones
• Ilocano: Pedro Bukaneg (epic transcription), Manuel Arguilla (also writes in English)
• Bicolano: Mariano Perfecto, Lorenzo Rosales
• Indigenous epics by region: Hudhud (Ifugao), Darangen (Maranao), Ibalon (Bikol), Biag ni Lam-ang (Ilocos), Hinilawod (Panay)

Pedagogy: reading and writing instruction

Major topics:

• Reading approaches: phonics, whole language, balanced literacy, content-area reading
• Reading strategies: SQ3R, KWL, think-aloud, reciprocal teaching
• Reading levels: independent, instructional, frustration
• Writing process: prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, publishing
• Writing approaches: process writing, genre-based writing, writing workshop
• Assessment of writing: rubrics, portfolio, peer review, self-assessment
• Differentiated reading instruction for struggling readers
• ESL/L2 reading and writing pedagogies (relevant for non-native English contexts)

Pedagogy: communication skills (listening, speaking)

• Listening: top-down vs. bottom-up processing, listening sub-skills (gist, detail, inference)
• Speaking: fluency vs. accuracy, pronunciation, intonation, communicative competence
• Oral communication assessment
• Public speaking and presentation skills instruction
• Pragmatics: speech acts, conversational implicature, politeness theory

Linguistics basics

• Phonetics and phonology: place and manner of articulation, English vowel and consonant inventory, IPA basics
• Morphology: free vs. bound morphemes, derivational vs. inflectional morphology
• Syntax: phrase structure, deep vs. surface structure (Chomsky), functional categories
• Semantics: sense vs. reference, polysemy, ambiguity
• Pragmatics: speech acts, deixis, implicature, presupposition
• Sociolinguistics: dialect, register, language variation, code-switching

Literary criticism approaches

A small block but testable:

• Formalism / New Criticism (close reading, text-as-autonomous)
• Structuralism (binary oppositions, signs, codes)
• Reader-response theory
• Marxist criticism
• Feminist criticism
• Post-colonial criticism (Said, Spivak, Bhabha)
• Psychoanalytic criticism (Freud, Lacan)
• Deconstruction (Derrida)

Items often ask "which critical approach would emphasise X?" Match the approach to its central concern.

K-12 English curriculum alignment

Items reference DepEd's English curriculum guide and MELCs. Drill list:

• The five macro skills: listening, speaking, reading, viewing, writing
• 21st-century skills integration in English instruction
• Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE) policy
• Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL)
• K-12 spiral progression in English language and literature

An 8-week English Major drilling plan

Realistic English Major scores

For a candidate running the 8-week plan above:

Aim for 80%+. At 40% weight, this gives strong cushion against weaker Gen Ed.

Where Super Tutor fits

Super Tutor's LET Secondary English Major track covers the full topic distribution. The Focused plan (₱49/week, ₱249/month, ₱1,999/year) opens the literature library, pedagogy item bank, and mock cycle.

What to read next

The LET Major Field overview covers the cross-major structure. The Prof Ed review and Gen Ed review cover the other two subtests. The LET Secondary pillar guide anchors everything.